


Kintsukuroi

by Dolorosa



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-10 13:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12912867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolorosa/pseuds/Dolorosa
Summary: Ketterdam is the only place where Kaz Brekker feels any semblance of safety and control. Inej Ghafa's feelings are more complicated: she left to fight the injustices she saw every day on Ketterdam's streets, but finds she's drawn back in spite of herself to the city where she spent so many years. And in that city — a city of refugees, misfits, and the dispossessed, the city where Kaz and Inej found each other — the pair slowly begin to mend the broken pieces of themselves.This fic takes place some time after the events ofCrooked Kingdom.





	Kintsukuroi

**Author's Note:**

  * For [singedsun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singedsun/gifts).



It was deep in the night when Kaz finally returned to the tiny attic room he currently called home. He'd been kept late in a particularly seedy gambling den, overseeing a truly harebrained scheme of Jesper's, but his close involvement had paid off, and there was a lightness in his step as he climbed the many flights of stairs. He unlocked the three locks, pushed open the door, and deposited the pack he'd been carrying with him on the rickety table in the corner before seating himself on the sagging bed. It was only then that he looked up. He had sensed that he was not alone from the moment he'd entered the room, but the intruder was a familiar presence — the closest thing to _safety_ he'd ever felt — and so he'd been unconcerned.

'I'm on the fifth floor,' he said. 'I'd locked the skylight inside and out. And, finally, I'd moved all operations, including my own room, into a new building deeper within the Barrel, a building you'd never seen and had no way of knowing about. And yet here you are. I should have known none of this would stop you.'

Inej uncoiled herself from on top of the wardrobe, where she'd been crouched, curled, like a cat, and dropped to the floor in a single, fluid movement.

'First floor, fifth floor — it's all the same to me,' she said.

He didn't ask how long she'd be staying, and she didn't offer the information. This was a familiar pattern for the two of them, repeated many times over the years since she had left. Her travels would bring her back to Ketterdam, and she would seek him out, tracking him down to whatever dingy lair he lurked in, her eyes made harder and her resolve made stronger than before by the fresh new horrors she'd encountered as she roamed the world. She would stay a little while — a week, a handful of days, a single night — before saying her goodbyes and returning to the mission that drove her. Those few days or hours existed outside of time, a brief moment in which the two of them could put their lives aside, and pause, and rest.

He never asked her to stay.

Kaz shifted up on the bed, making space for Inej to sit down beside him, moving, without being asked, so that Inej could position herself in a way that made it possible for her to face the door, while also being directly under the skylight. This, again, was something he knew to do without being told, in the same way that Inej, although sitting next to him, knew to leave enough space that he could move his limbs without ever touching her. The two of them sat in silence for a moment, side by side on the narrow bed, not relaxing, exactly — the tension that was in them both was such that it never truly left their bodies, but when they were together, they felt safer in that tense vulnerability — but suffused with a rare sense of stillness.

'My last trip took me further than I'd ever been before,' said Inej, breaking the silence. 'We were at sea for months, chasing a rumour that took us around the Shu Han coast to the south and east, until we had almost dropped off the map. We'd exhausted the knowledge of even our most experienced navigators, but still we persisted, until we finally caught up with the slave ship. We intercepted them in the dead of night, during a storm.'

She closed her eyes briefly, not wishing to dwell too long on that night. She remained as committed as ever to the cause that had driven her to take to the sea and the endlessly unfolding road, but the unceasing nature of the task, and the fact that despite heroic rescues in one corner of the world there were likely to be other ships, other injustices elsewhere that she had missed, wore her down. Rescues felt less like victories and more like balancing out the status quo. Her zeal was less ardent, these days.

'Most of the people we liberated had come from Shu Han or Ravka — we returned them to their homes on our way back to Ketterdam. But there were some who came from a country I'd never even heard of, a tiny island to the east of Shu Han. It was only a handful of them, teenage girls, all of them cousins or sisters from the same community, a coastal village whose inhabitants mostly worked in the sea, fishing or harvesting kelp. And their families were so relieved that we'd found their daughters and brought them home that they gave us gifts.'

Inej stood up on the bed, and reached over Kaz to retrieve a package she'd left on top of the wardrobe.

'They had a way of making pottery,' she said, unfolding the wrapping of the package, which smelled faintly of the sea. 'If something was broken, instead of throwing it away, or gluing it back together in as seamless a way as possible to make the mending invisible, they would thread the broken pieces together with gold, so that the repair became a feature of the design.'

And she placed the delicate piece of pottery in Kaz's hands. It was a medium-sized bowl, deep greyish-green in colour, with a seam of gold running through.

'I have no need for it,' said Inej. 'I cannot carry it with me on the ship, and so I want you to have it. Keep it, sell it, use it to collect the bets for a rigged game of cards — I don't care, as long as you make use of it in some way.'

Kaz turned the bowl around and around in his gloved hands. The gold thread glinted, flashing whenever it picked up the light of the moon that shone through the skylight. Inej drew her knees up under her chin, as if she were trying to inhabit as small a space as possible.

'Sometimes,' she said, 'when we rescue people, it ends up like that — their families are grateful, they feed us and welcome us and give us gifts. Sometimes they even try to pay us. And then sometimes ... sometimes we discover that it was their families that sold them into slavery to begin with, out of greed, out of fear, or out of desperation. Understandably, then, they don't much want to return to their families. I mentioned before that most of those in this recent rescue came from Shu Han or Ravka — some of the Ravkans had been betrayed in this way. So we gave them a choice: join us on the ship and help us rid the world of the slave trade, or try to build a new life in Ketterdam. This lot all elected to stay in Ketterdam — they're on the ship now, but tomorrow I'll need to take them to the Ravkan refugees, and see if they can find a home in that community. Their own families, Kaz! Their own families did this to them! They took their homes from them, and although we caught the slavers, the families are going to go on living their lives, having sent their own children, brothers, sisters into exile. Sometimes it feels like the world is broken.'

Kaz was still holding the bowl. He stood up, carefully, slowly — as always, conscious of how to move around Inej, signalling what he was doing and avoiding any sudden, startling movements — and placed her gift on the table, before turning to face her.

'Maybe it will be an exile for them,' he said. 'Ketterdam is hard to get used to, for some. But I'm still here, and Jesper's still here, and Wylan — even though he's the closest thing to a Ketterdam native of all of us, I don't really think he saw this place as home until he lived among us in the Barrel. As you know, Nina drifted back, eventually, although she had to go as far away as Ravka to realise that it was not a place she could truly return to. Maybe it will be the same for your latest clutch of rescued Ravkans.'

As always, he had left so many things unspoken. Like their encounters, their conversations were made up of words unsaid, things implied — the spaces between. Ketterdam — their Ketterdam, a city of decaying warehouses and dark corners and garish gambling dens, held together by alleyways and secret canals and networks of gossip and bargaining and obligation — was the place you came when all your other options had been exhausted. It was a city of exiles and refugees and outcasts, lost and broken people, who, with luck and connections and the right amount of gold, might be able to put themselves back together. It was the place that cut Inej under her armour, that she fled from, and for which she persisted in her quest to save others from the fate that had brought her to it. She could never quite admit that it had become, if anything, home, and that her heroics were an attempt to prove herself worthy of returning, and remaining for good.

Kaz struck a match, and lit the sole lamp in the room. The light flared, and then settled down to its usual steady glow, illuminating Inej where she sat, curled in on herself, on the bed. Slowly, carefully, she uncoiled, and stood to join him by the table. She touched the bowl she had given him briefly. The lamplight picked out flecks of coppery red in the green of the pottery. Kaz stood taut, his face shadowed.

'I think,' said Inej, 'that I am almost ready to come home. One more trip — one more rescue, just one more, and then I will sell the ship, or hand it over so that others can continue my work. Just one more time, and then I'll return, and stay.'

Her hand rested on the table, like a question, and, after a few fraught seconds, Kaz answered it, removing his gloves and placing his own hand next to hers. The space between them remained — their hands did not touch, but the air seemed to pool and dance around them, charged and bright and golden. With her other hand, Inej removed her knives, and placed them next to Kaz's gloves, where they lay beside the cracked, glinting bowl. The lamplight flickered and flared, as they turned to face one another at last, and found the courage to look each other in the eye.

**Author's Note:**

> [Kintsukuroi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi), also known as Kintsugi, is a Japanese technique of repairing broken pottery so that the breaks are still visible, but are threaded through with gold.


End file.
